Campaigns are losing the mobile war

Democrats and Republicans both talk a big technology game, but many of their 2014 candidates have a shortcoming that appears to be leaving money and votes on the table.

The culprit: bad mobile websites.

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A POLITICO analysis of mobile sites for about 40 competitive House and Senate races found that a majority were plagued with missed opportunities for campaigns trying to find volunteers, donors and voters. The no-nos range from clunky pages that frequently crashed or weren’t formatted properly to content that was just too tiny to read.

Another big problem often discouraged by some political consultants: multiple pages of navigation before a potential donor can hit the send button with their all-important credit card numbers.

“No one likes to fill those form fields on a mobile device,” said Jonathan Karush, a Democratic digital consultant and president of the communications firm Liberty Concepts. “It’s a pain.”

Political operatives from both parties say they recognize mobile’s tantalizing possibilities. Still, many campaigns are cutting corners on the mobile front — ignoring pleas for fewer tabs or larger font sizes — even if the potential payoff could mean more votes or thousands of dollars in additional donations. They’re reluctant to shift limited budget dollars away from traditional TV ads, especially for innovations that have a short shelf life limited to this election season.

To digital campaign strategists, seeing the shortcomings on the mobile front makes little sense considering how Americans have come to obsessively use their phones as their primary source not just for daily communication but also for entertainment.

“No one here has their TV today. But everyone here has got their mobile phone,” Steven Moore, managing director for the GOP firm CampaignGrid, said earlier this summer during a San Francisco conference hosted by Campaigns & Elections magazine. “Why aren’t we spending more voter contact money on our mobile phones?”

Campaigns may be struggling to answer this question, but that hasn’t stopped them from trying to get in on the mobile game.

Take Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, for example. McConnell supporters can start their donation process on a cellphone — but the process doesn’t end there. The Kentucky Republican’s campaign — which saw more than half its May primary day website traffic come via mobile device — will follow through and “remarket” the visitor with new pop-up donation ads urging a return to the original site.

When a POLITICO reporter using an iPhone 4s recently tried several times to simply load McConnell’s campaign home page (which includes a video, social media highlights and a request for an endorsement), the phone’s Web browser crashed, the phone’s screen went to all black and the phone’s home-screen popped up, unprompted.

But the site also loaded just fine on an iPhone 5 last week, showing how different mobile phone models can affect the user experience. Ideally, a site should work well for people using any type of smartphone.

McConnell is hardly alone. Recent and repeated visits to the mobile pages for other leading House and Senate candidates (using both an iPhone 4s and an iPhone 5) found more than half had trouble spots — from cluttered sites designed to be viewed on a much larger device like a laptop or desktop to multiple-step fundraising forms that can discourage a potential donor from hitting the final send button.

Visiting Rep. Joe Garcia’s mobile site on an iPhone throughout the summer, for instance, brought up this graphic at the top: “JOE GARC.”

But the site was relaunched last week to make it more mobile-friendly, according to campaign spokesman Miguel Salazar, who said the update optimizes the viewing experience for the Florida Democrat’s website. Now, Garcia’s name isn’t chopped off.

Another problem recently plagued Republican Robert Dold, who is running for his old suburban Chicago House seat. On Dold’s mobile website, it takes three steps for new donors to give money. But campaign manager James Slepian said Dold also introduced a one-click option that asks every online supporter if they want to save their credit card information in the hope it will bring them back multiple times — and, most important, with more cash.

“Just like anything else, if you make it easier to donate, they’re more inclined to do it more often,” he said.

Other 2014 candidates with subpar mobile sites include Frank Guinta (R-N.H.), who has a site cluttered with tabs, and Reps. Julia Brownley (D-Calif.) and Ann Kirkpatrick (D-Ariz.), whose mobile sites look identical to their desktop versions.

To be sure, there are a number of candidates running this year that have their mobile experience right. Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) has a site with several pictures, easy to read text and big buttons to click to volunteer and contribute. It also asks users to immediately enter their email address and ZIP code, critical information for future campaign communications. Others with solid, user-friendly credentials include Pryor’s Republican opponent, Rep. Tom Cotton, whose mobile site starts with the option to view his latest TV ad; Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) and her GOP challenger, ThomTillis; and Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.).

Mobile technologies are hardly brand new to the campaign trail. Democratic digital strategists in 2012 were tinkering with applications that helped voters use cellphones to look up their polling places on Election Day.